Excerpt: "The Language of God"

July 14, 2006

Page 10 of 15

The book was "Mere Christianity" by C. S. Lewis. In the next
few days, as I turned its pages, struggling to absorb the breadth
and depth of the intellectual arguments laid down by this legendary
Oxford scholar, I realized that all of my own constructs
against the plausibility of faith were those of a schoolboy.
Clearly I would need to start with a clean slate to consider this
most important of all human questions. Lewis seemed to know
all of my objections, sometimes even before I had quite formulated
them. He invariably addressed them within a page or two.
When I learned subsequently that Lewis had himself been an
atheist, who had set out to disprove faith on the basis of logical
argument, I recognized how he could be so insightful about my
path. It had been his path as well.

The argument that most caught my attention, and most
rocked my ideas about science and spirit down to their foundation,
was right there in the title of Book One: "Right and Wrong
as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe." While in many ways
the "Moral Law" that Lewis described was a universal feature of
human existence, in other ways it was as if I was recognizing it
for the first time.

To understand the Moral Law, it is useful to consider, as
Lewis did, how it is invoked in hundreds of ways each day without
the invoker stopping to point out the foundation of his argument.
Disagreements are part of daily life. Some are mundane,
as the wife criticizing her husband for not speaking more kindly
to a friend, or a child complaining, "It's not fair," when different
amounts of ice cream are doled out at a birthday party. Other
arguments take on larger significance. In international affairs,
for instance, some argue that the United States has a moral obligation
to spread democracy throughout the world, even if it
requires military force, whereas others say that the aggressive,
unilateral use of military and economic force threatens to
squander moral authority.

In the area of medicine, furious debates currently surround
the question of whether or not it is acceptable to carry out research
on human embryonic stem cells. Some argue that such
research violates the sanctity of human life; others posit that
the potential to alleviate human suffering constitutes an ethical
mandate to proceed. (This topic and several other dilemmas in
bioethics are considered in the Appendix to this book.)
Notice that in all these examples, each party attempts to
appeal to an unstated higher standard. This standard is the
Moral Law. It might also be called "the law of right behavior,"
and its existence in each of these situations seems unquestioned.

What is being debated is whether one action or another
is a closer approximation to the demands of that law. Those accused
of having fallen short, such as the husband who is insufficiently
cordial to his wife's friend, usually respond with a
variety of excuses why they should be let off the hook. Virtually
never does the respondent say, "To hell with your concept of
right behavior."

What we have here is very peculiar: the concept of right
and wrong appears to be universal among all members of the
human species (though its application may result in wildly different
outcomes). It thus seems to be a phenomenon approaching
that of a law, like the law of gravitation or of special
relativity. Yet in this instance, it is a law that, if we are honest
with ourselves, is broken with astounding regularity.